


praise player one

by akitania (spacehairdresser)



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Identity Issues, M/M, fun and flirty memory diving
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-20 20:29:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11928669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehairdresser/pseuds/akitania
Summary: The Chime leaves the memory farm. Aria is herself again, whatever that means.





	praise player one

**Author's Note:**

> _  
> [Infinite lives, the time will come up.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuta3PDr-4E)  
>  _

She started crying about half a minute after the simulation ended, the moment her eyes focused and she saw himself — saw _him_ , Jace, she was Aria Joie again — so thin and pale on the bed. Once, at Joypark, she’d watched a python shed its skin, and it was all she could think of as she watched the hollow rise and fall of Jace’s chest. All of that had been inside him, and it had all been sheared away above the sea of Counterweight. Mako grabbed her at once, maybe more to steady himself than to comfort her, and Orth lifted his hand from Jace’s brow to rest it awkwardly on her shoulder.

AuDy tilted their antennae away, maybe politely. Cass stared at the floor.

“I’m fine,” she announced, blinking hard. “Just give me a sec.”

 

All things considered, it was good to be back in her own body and head. Jace had two arms, hair cut to military standards, a tightness in his chest, and prescience ticking in the back of his mind. She’d felt claustrophobic within him.

And all things considered, it was an understandable time for Cass to walk in on her staring at her reflection in a vid screen with her own music bouncing around her quarters. It was something she did without excuse, but she had one, this time.

“I knocked,” Cass said to her accusatory look, with an explanatory gesture. They blinked at the music. “Is this you?”

God, they really didn’t listen to anything from this millennium, did they. Fair enough, this time. “I wrote it for the fifth anniversary,” she said, turning it down. “So this is _its_ fifth anniversary. It was actually more about Addax, because there was this big delegation from Grace coming that year, but it turned out kind of shit because I knew way less about him. So it was really just another Jace song, but with a bunch of power of friendship stuff.”

“It’s nice,” Cass said without an attempt at sincerity. Their wrist comm beeped, and they didn’t check it.

Aria grimaced. “Just hate it, it’s fine. I’d do it totally differently now.” She smirked, struck a pose on her bed. “ _Way_ more romantic. I was always really good at love songs, even though I wasn’t allowed to date anyone because of the junk in my contract.”

Cass wasn’t really looking at her, or anything at all; they’d barely spoken on the way back to the Kingdom Come. “Have you looked at the news since we woke up?” Their voice was mean, but only in the way it was when they weren’t paying attention. Aria sat up.

“Not really? There’s a _lot_ , we’ve missed a lot.”

She wished she knew why Cass looked so tired. They always looked tired. “I have some things to take care of. I’ll be back soon.”

Doors on the Kingdom Come couldn’t slam, they just bounced open again, but Aria got the message.

 

Before Tea intercepted her, new eye blank and old one glazed in a way that drew up nothing in Aria’s cache of new memories, she did actually have the time to catch up on the news. It was a whole day of ghosts, to the point that it felt like a prank — there was Sokrates, stony-faced on the screen, looking more like Cass than they ever had in the Golden War. Oh, fuck. Sorry, Cass.

It certainly didn’t help in her conversation with Tea, which needed what it could get. She kept wanting to hug her, just for being alive in a state past statis, but Tea was all slick bitterness. Someone had gone and taken a bat to her knuckles whenever she tried to hold on to anything, and now it was her own life snatched away from her. Sorry, Tea. She looked tired, too.

“I thought you should know,” Aria said in a low voice before she left, “I visited Jace. I ran the simulation.”

Tea’s mismatched eyes sharpened, and Aria could roll back ten years to see the woman who had tried to run and had not been allowed even that. “Don’t talk to me about the goddamn simulation.”

Aria hadn’t been planning on going _in_ on the subject, not in the least because she kept remembering (Jace) hooking up with Tea in shadowed corners of the hangar bay, good going, Jace. She wasn’t sure that making any claim to know the woman would help her case — she’d gotten more than she’d ever expected to want, and as real as it had felt in the moment to hold Tea Kenridge in Jace’s arms and fight shoulder to shoulder with her, to sit across a table drinking chai with her, it felt like it had happened to someone else. (It had.)

She considered the subject dropped, but Tea added, ponderous, “I only went to the memory farm once, right after the war ended. When I woke up, you know who was there?”

If the simulation had taught her anything, it was to recognize that kind of simmering venom. “Ibex?”

Tea shook her head with the satisfaction of righteous — no, not that word — justified anger. “Addax _fucking_ Dawn.”

The last time she’d seen Addax, he was destroying the Panther with detached precision. He had been calculating the losses if he terminated the fleet. Jace had been terrified, more than he’d ever been.

He’d also been, for the entire, interminable run of the stupid suicide mission, pretty madly in love. So there was a part of Aria that thought, picturing Addax plugged into the simulation, hand maybe stretched out limply toward Jace, _oh, that’s pretty sweet_.

She didn’t say that to Tea. “Huh,” she stalled, and was saved from needing to elaborate when Tea became distracted by a news stream and cursed.

“Tell your Apostolosian their new off-brand emperor is an idiot,” Tea said, rising to her feet. “I have to go.”

“I’m pretty sure they know,” Aria said to her retreating back.

 

She didn’t pass the message on to Cass. “Can I hug you?” she asked on the way to the Spaceport, and when they assented vaguely, she pulled them in until her chin was resting on their shoulder. “I’m really sorry about your parent. And, uh, the rest of it.” _Your entire civilization, even though we both know it was the worst._ They both had new toys to pick up, and both were pretty grim inheritances.

Cass didn’t exactly hug her back, just passed a hand uncertainly across her shoulder blades. “Don’t,” they said, their words stilted, “Not right now, all right?”

“Hey, there’ll be plenty of time to talk in darkspace,” Aria agreed, but didn’t let go, selfishly relieved by an anchor to the present.

“Fine,” they said. “If we ever get there. Hug over, though. Before Mako finds out and tries to make it a group thing.”

Mako was occupied bothering Orth, telling him about what a great guy J-M was and how this was definitely going to work, but Aria relented, feeling forgiven. Forgiven and aching in half a dozen different ways. She didn’t know what it was like to lose someone she loved, and she wasn’t sure she knew what it was like to lose someone she felt like she was probably supposed to love. She’d ask Cass, sometime, but she’d never begrudged them for not wanting to talk about family. She never did, either, definitely not to them. (Her parents were good patriots, she’d admitted to Mako once, embarrassed. Patriots who raised a brood of good patriots. She signed to Joypark because she was fame-hungry, not a zealot, but things stuck with you.)

(Mako was pretty insistent she was still a zealot, anyway.)

The Rethal-Addax Spaceport was coming into view through the window. She pointed. “How do you think they’d feel about it?” The hyphenated name, the lopsided statue, their images mass-produced and signified. Maybe she knew, since they’d both disappeared, Jace into the past to spend ten years self-flagellating for letting this be the outcome.

Cass drummed their fingers on the bench. They looked abstracted, but Aria had known them long enough to pick out when they weren’t paying attention and when they were just making a show of thoughtfulness. “Addax felt terrible in those last moments, and he’s still probably… not the _happiest_ about what he did then, but I honestly think he’d be glad people remember the alliance. He _is_ glad?” They scrunched their nose. “Who knows what he thinks now.”

Aria watched the glowing names grow bigger and brighter. “He went to the memory farm at least once, and I guess he saw the same things we did.”

“He was in love with him.” Cass made eye contact, the flat stare that used to creep her out so much. “Addax, with Jace — you’d know the other way around, I guess.”

“I’m pretty sure everyone did,” Aria said, biting down on an excitement that had no place anymore. She had been Jace so recently, and Jace would have been elated that all his dumb flirting hadn’t been a waste, but then he had become afraid. And then Addax had made his own decisions. And Jace ended up in a memory farm, chasing down alternatives he wouldn’t let himself have.

"He thought he was beautiful," said Cass, and they sounded a little amused, but fondly. Another thing she had to ask sometime — how could they live in the head of someone they hated so much?

"Hey," Aria joked. "He was. Fuck! Why didn't I write them a better song?"

**Author's Note:**

> Then Aria got a cool assassin gf and forgot to talk to Cass about their family problems, but everyone was happier for it.
> 
> If you'd like to chat about friendly tables, I'm on tumblr at [akitania](http://akitania.tumblr.com)!


End file.
